HappyNeuron Pro is a digital cognitive therapy tool. Designed by neuroscientists, our tool offers engaging and customizable cognitive exercises.
While school teaches a wide variety of concepts, specifically addressing children’s cognitive abilities may provide them with foundational skills to support the rest of their education and lives. Let’s explore how to use cognitive exercises for education to help students with their cognitive well-being.
Cognition includes a multitude of skills, such as memory, language, processing speed, social cognition, and much more. Essentially, cognition encompasses everything our brains can do, which is pretty much limitless! And different students will have different strengths – for example, a student may excel in their language skills but have difficulty with arithmetic.
HappyNeuron Pro offers exercises for a wide range of cognitive skills, but for now, let’s break down a few skills that may be especially helpful for students to practice in middle and high school.
Practicing attention skills can serve students throughout the rest of their lives, particularly in our modern world where shorter attention spans are sometimes encouraged through entertainment and social media.
All kinds of attention are important for daily life, and practicing these skills through attention exercises can help students develop these skills.
Executive function skills refer to a range of high-level cognitive functions. These are skills that even cognitively healthy adults may struggle with sometimes. These skills include planning, making decisions, problem-solving, regulating emotions, and goal-directed behavior. Executive function exercises involve thinking ahead, strategizing, making decisions, and inhibiting actions that may lead to unwanted outcomes.
Language skills encompass a wide range of abilities surrounding communication, both verbal and written. Spelling, verbal memory, reading comprehension, and expressive language are among the skills that can be practiced with language exercises. Language skills are necessary for many real-life situations like writing a resume, interviewing for a job, building friendships, and giving speeches.
Educators can use digital cognitive exercises to help students work on an extensive variety of abilities like auditory processing, social cognition skills (such as remembering names, faces, and details from a conversation), memory, processing speed, and visual-spatial reasoning.
Explore our library of exercises to try out our 45 exercises, and learn which cognitive skills they help with.
It’s important to address cognitive skills for daily life activities, but cognition also plays a huge role in school-specific tasks. Digital cognitive exercises can also help students in the following areas:
Preparing for tests like finals or the SATs is no small undertaking! While students need to brush up on specific subjects, it can also be beneficial to work on cognitive skills related to test-taking. For example, a student who has been exercising their memory and executive functions may have an easier time recalling information that they studied. They also may take the time to plan their study schedule, and inhibit behaviors like going on their phone in the middle of a study session.
Cognitive skills are also vitally important for career success, regardless of the career path a student chooses. As an example, working in construction involves visual-spatial skills, executive functions like planning ahead, and attention. Working in an office involves attention skills, as well as auditory processing and expressive language skills for participating in meetings.
While all cognitive skills play a role in our daily lives, these are just a few simplified examples to express the importance of cognitive health in a student’s future.
Cognitive skills can be exercised in a group setting, making the process fun, realistic, and rewarding. In groups, students can roleplay tasks that require cognitive strength.
Here are a few examples of group activities that exercise cognition and can be useful in their education, pursuing a career, and beyond:
Cognitive exercises help students prepare for multi-step life skills in the real world, like laundry and grocery shopping! IADLs are “activities to support daily life in the home and community” (OTPF-4, 2020). A few other IADLs may include: cooking, ordering food at a restaurant, money management, driving, meal prep and cleanup, and safety and emergency management, and much more.
HappyNeuron Pro activities may assist in building skills for these tasks requiring increasing memory, processing, executive functioning, and planning. For example our “You’ve Got Voicemail” activity helps address auditory processing and memory recall when communicating with peers. Or our “Restaurant” activity can interactively guide students with the visual and verbal memory required with taking someone’s menu order as a waiter.
For students who have learning disabilities or intellectual disabilities, stimulating cognitive skills can be beneficial. Challenging one’s cognitive skills is generally a healthy practice. It can help to build cognitive abilities and to practice soft skills like patience and resilience. Since HappyNeuron Pro is an adaptable program, the student can play the exercises at an appropriate level of difficulty. The exercises should be challenging but fun!
Happy Neuron is adaptable to meet a child’s needs. This may be done within individual program activities, as well as browser-based plug-ins and settings. This may include:
Students in middle and high school are building foundational skills. Educators and school counselors can assist in ensuring that their cognitive skills are strong and ready to take on the world! Having a strong foundation of cognitive functions may help them feel in control of their path, and even help them lead a fulfilling life.
Download our Education Brochure to learn more – including why students love HappyNeuron Pro, pricing, and FAQs!
Occupational Therapy Practice Framework: Domain and Process—Fourth Edition. Am J Occup Ther August 2020, Vol. 74(Supplement_2), 7412410010p1–7412410010p87. doi: https://doi.org/10.5014/ajot.2020.74S2001
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